In the Silence

I love words.

I love to read them, love to type them out, love to put pen to paper and let the words flow.

I listen to my older daughters sound out words and read stories and learn to form words of their own.

Zeruiah, she babbles nonsensically and then claps three times when she is done.


Words tie hearts together and friendships and relationships are born and supported within the realm of what is spoken and written down and sent.

One of my daughters, she wept in my arms last night - so very terrified to get it all wrong. She curled herself up in the circle of my arms and whispered that she didn't pray.

She doesn't want to get the words wrong,

so tired of starting over every time she thinks she's messed up that she's just given up.


But she doesn't have to get the words right, how could I have never told her that? There is One Who has mined the depths of us and the words that seem to be lost on our tongues are found in His scars and He stands between us and Holy God and He intercedes for His own...

No, our words don't have to be perfect to be heard.

They squabble hard in long shadows of winter,

pick at each others hearts with barbed words that tear wounds into the tender places.

Their eyes are flint and arms crossed like shields and having never had a sister, I find myself lost.


But I know, though I wish I didn't, how words can destroy and lay waste and scar the landscape of a heart. I love words and their flow, but I also know intimately how destructive they can be.

Hardened eyes and protected hearts are only a ruse...

We want to be known and loved and cherished and when it's all threatened, when our greatest fears are realized, we go on the defensive instead of running to our Defender the words we love and cherish can turn into weapons that wreck havoc on the very heart we are trying to protect.

Over a kitchen sink and hot running water this morning, as words were boiling and churning deep inside - as I found myself restless over thoughts and questions I haven't found ways to voice, He spoke.

Not in loud audible ways, but in typed and printed out words that I have placed to the right of my window -

Life is hard and broken and it presses in and brings out the very worst.

But there is One...

There is One Who was beaten, broken, bruised, pierced for our every sin - He was smitten and rejected by His Father all because of the very humanity that was doing the breaking and the beating and the bruising...

And He didn't open His mouth.

He was oppressed, and He was afflicted,

yet He opened not His mouth;

like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,

and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,

so he opened not His mouth.

I love words, the flow of them; the beauty of them.

I love how they sound and the perfect placement of each one.

But I am asked to love The Word Made Flesh more - to trust that His Words are the ones that can heal and restore.

The Lamb Who Kept Silent sings love over His own and there is healing there in the silence, in the rest.

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment or in the silence of the aftermath or the calm of a day gone right, the only words I need to trace are the ones that He Is...